John Thornton (historian) - Works

Works

Thornton focused initially on the history of the Kingdom of Kongo. From the start of this work, Thornton became convinced that the status of Kongo as a Christian country had not been fully recognized through his work on missionary baptismal statistics which he sought to show reflected large scale baptism and used this material to write a treatise on Kongo demography. His work on baptismal records resulted in the publication of the article "Demography and History in the Kingdom of Kongo" (1977), and a contribution on another baptismal document in the First Edinburgh Conference on African Historical Demography (1978).

Thornton's thesis, published as The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641-1718 (Madison, 1983) advanced the idea that Kongo's centralization was the result of a massive build up of slave worked plantations in the vicinity of its capital during the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, and allowed kings of be overwhelmingly powerful. However, he argued, the persistent civil wars of the seventeenth century and the rise of a new population center in the coastal province of Soyo led to the depopulation of São Salvador and the loss of its centralization. In addition to this larger theme, Thornton also tried to integrate a history from below description of daily life and culture in the country by mining carefully the extensive documentation of the Capuchin missionaries in the country. In this work, he deliberately ignored using either earlier or later materials and much of the ethnographic materials so as to determine continuity and change in the kingdom. Thornton would return to this theme in writing the biography of D Beatriz Kimpa Vita in showing the daily life of Kongo in her times (1684–1706).

Thornton's second book, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1650 (Cambridge University Press, 1992, the second edition in 1998 extended its framework to 1800) was an examination of the Atlantic portions of Africa and their involvement in the Atlantic slave trade, as well as the impact of Africans in the American countries to which they were carried. In this work, Thornton sought to demonstrate that Africans had been more active participants in the trade that was previously believed, arguing controversially that African economic strength and power were sufficient to force Europeans to deal with them on their own terms.

At the same time, he also argued that Africans were not stripped of their culture in the Middle Passage and retained most of it in the first generation of their captivity. He tried to show how African sensibilities continued to be dominant in the first generation of captives in art, music, and language. He also suggested that resistance in the form of revolts in particular had roots in African military systems, and this last point was pursued in detail in several studies of slave revolts and the Haitian Revolution.

His studies of Africa in the slave trade led him, at the urging of English historian Jeremy Black to write a systematic study of African wars and military culture in the period of the slave trade, which appeared in 1999 as Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500-1800 (University College of London, 1999).

In 2007 he and his longtime collaborator (and wife) Linda Heywood published Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660 (Cambridge University Press). This work demonstrated that thanks to English and Dutch privateering on Portuguese vessels, virtually all the first generation of slaves brought to the colonies of these two countries came from Central Africa. They then went on to argue that the long contact between this region and Europe, the conversion of many of the people to Christianity, and the adaptation of various European items of culture, they could be considered "Atlantic Creoles" a term popularized by historian Ira Berlin. Basing themselves of many local archives in the United States, Bermuda, Barbados, England and the Netherlands, they went on to suggest that the Christian background of many early slaves may account for their high manumission rate and their role in cultural foundations of the Americas.

Read more about this topic:  John Thornton (historian)

Famous quotes containing the word works:

    The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.
    Freya Stark (b. 1893–1993)

    Only the more uncompromising of the mystics still seek for knowledge in a silent land of absolute intuition, where the intellect finally lays down its conceptual tools, and rests from its pragmatic labors, while its works do not follow it, but are simply forgotten, and are as if they never had been.
    Josiah Royce (1855–1916)

    Audible prayer can never do the works of spiritual understanding, which regenerates; but silent prayer, watchfulness, and devout obedience enable us to follow Jesus’ example. Long prayers, superstition, and creeds clip the strong pinions of love, and clothe religion in human forms. Whatever materializes worship hinders man’s spiritual growth and keeps him from demonstrating his power over error.
    Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910)